The Philippine Online Chronicles

On our first legitimately post-GMA Independence Day, after all the numerously varied attempts to oust have been blanketly abortively unsuccessful, in no small part thanks to a national public made complicit by being too distracted by its own individual miseries and fantasies - too distracted by trying to survive - it bears reassessing what the word "freedom" now means for us.

Freedom by itself is an anarchist idea. It is a dangerously explosive concept, one that can potentially cause great harm: true absolute freedom is to make choices without commitment to its consequences; it is to choose not to recognize any sort of authority whatsoever; it is mad abandon; it is irresponsibility dressed up in the emperor's new clothes. Freedom by itself - unearned, unanalyzed, unopposed - leads to an excess of wants leads to a confusion of wants leads to paralysis.

Freedom by itself has no practical use whatsoever, the recognition of which is our deliberate choosing to interpret the word as "democracy." Democracy itself is a paradox: founded on the notion that the majority knows better than the minority, it is the individual's freedom to choose for everyone else. In that case, what is democracy in the Age of Hello Garci? What is democracy when it really is the minority choosing for the majority? What is democracy if the majority chooses to remain idle and uncritical, preferring to grin and bear the pain than act against it out of sheer literal tiredness? What is democracy but a consensual self-created mass hallucination as alternative to anarchy - absolute freedom - and fascism - absolute oppression?

Freedom by itself is no cause for celebration. The fact is, the more oppressive the situation, the sweeter freedom is. The fact is, we need restriction to appreciate liberation. The fact is, absolute freedom is just as bad as absolute repression. The fact is, it is in the overlaps of both that are the most fertile territories, where the flowers grow from the shit and water and dirt and sun. The fact is, our most fertile territories nowadays are our malls and our Wowowees and our BPOs. The fact is, our flowers nowadays are day-glo plastic anthuriums obscenely protruding from their day-glo plastic pots.

This is what freedom has come to mean these past ten years: the minority has already chosen for the majority, and it has chosen to buy and sell - the freedom to get what you want (everything) when you want it (now). And this freedom is so absolute and so absolutely invisible in its ubiquity and simplicity we have taken it unearned, unanalyzed, unopposed. It is a freedom we're told we'd earned through hard work, through work so hard we're too tired to see it for what it really is: a means of control, of subjugation, of oppression. It is freedom as an excess of wants, as a confusion of wants, as paralysis: the only legitimate choices in the face of an infinity of options is to either choose everything or to choose nothing. Freedom unopposed unanalyzed unearned is just another word for nothing left to choose. Or at least, that's how it goes for people who actually have a choice: for those of us who don't - can't - even have the comfortable convenience of the illusion of freedom, for those of us who don't - can't - even choose to celebrate freedom unearned unanalyzed unopposed, it really is just another word: maybe a name of a street, maybe a name of a song, everything but a concept, everything but a reality, everything but a choice.

So today, in the face of an infinity of options, let those of us who can choose choose to celebrate fascism. Let us recognize that we need our manacles - our conquistadors and our policemen and our dictators - even if the best that we can come up with shall conveniently remain merely mind-forg'd: let us remember our old monsters; let us remember Marcos as we relish putting his first born son and daughter and celebrated celebrity widow in legitimate official office in our latest legitimate official exercise of our right to choose; let us remember the Japanese Occupation in our imitation mangas and Filipino-dubbed animes, the Philippine-American War in our summer weekend blockbusters and Xbox customer care services; let us remember how they had threatened us and scared us and killed us; let us remember what it was really like to suffer, to truly fight for one's own life, to truly fight for another's right to live, to truly fight for another's right to choose.

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